Testing, testing...

Eagle-eyed readers will have noted from a previous post that I had a date with gymnastics last week.

Not competing, of course, although my floor routine to (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman is quite something, particularly the star-jump-into-forward-roll sequence, which is so spectacular I essentially repeat it for the duration of the programme. My marks for difficulty are, in general, heavily outweighed by those for performance, but what performance! If your living room carpet is vast enough, I'd be more than willing to pop over and demonstrate. Please ensure I cannot bump my head on the coffee table or similar. I am extremely litigious.

No, this was, of course, one of the Olympic test events at the North Greenwich Arena. Not the O2 Arena. Oh no. The Olympics does not recognise O2 as a valid sponsor. If you say the words O2 repeatedly in the presence of Lord Coe or one of his LOCOG droids, they spin round on the spot as smoke and springs are propelled from their featureless middles while they emit the words 'Happy Meal! Happy Meal!' at ever-increasing pitch and volume until your ears bleed.

Anyway, look, it's a bit like being at the Olympics but with far less people there, they're presumably hoping.

Aren't you wildy excited? Luckily, LOGOC have sought to quell your rabid enthusiasm by lighting the arena so brightly as to remind one of a friend's brand-new kitchen extension, or some kind of deeply unethical laboratory, thus creating all the atmosphere associated with the latter.

Here you can see the competitors for the rings event lining up, along with the lady who leads them on their march into the arena and carries a sign bearing the name of the event. 

Perhaps you think that this lady and her sign look a little blandly presented, and that this is an effect caused by my poor photography skills or the bleachingly harsh lighting? Well, one out of two ain't bad, as Meatloaf initially wrote, before a surer grasp of fractions prompted a rewrite. My photography is, on this rare occasion, not to blame.

No one is suggesting any more money than is strictly necessary should be spent on these events; no one is suggesting this lady should wear a spangly leotard and feather headdress and write out the name of the event in the air with burning sparklers as she enters on stilts, but perhaps we could have aimed a little higher than the look of a volunteer who didn't have time to change her clothes after finishing her temping job at HSBC (luckily she'd found time to print out the signs – Times Roman, A4 – during her lunch-hour).

However, it wasn't entirely a razzamatazz vacuum. There was a brief moment of magic as the gymnasts marched on to music that was Star Wars-esque – or, perhaps, actually from Star Wars. I'm not big on the sci-fi classics. Iconic, rousing theme music soundtracking the parades and presentations at the Games? This is an idea I could get behind, but John Williams is American. We need something resolutely British. Perhaps the estate of the late Ronnie Hazlehurst could licence a reworking of the Are You Being Served? theme tune to introduce all the apparatus as the gymnasts walk on ('Beam, floor and pommel horse; vault and uneven bars; coming up!')

All this would have been entirely lost on the lady sitting two seats away from me, however, who had apparently seen the evening as an opportunity to catch up on her emails. We're all busy people, after all.

Luckily, when the national anthems were being played for the victors, she did have the good grace to stand up and respectfully lower the lid of her laptop slightly. 

Perhaps she and her partner were working on a modern art project where they act out scenes from disappointing romcoms in public places. Here, of course, they are giving their take on the sequence from the US Fever Pitch remake The Perfect Catch, where Drew Barrymore's character takes her laptop to the Red Sox game and, in failing to focus on the game, ends up knocked out by a flying baseball. This, I realise, is unlikely to happen in artistic gymnastics, but at the rhythmic disciplines (taking place on another evening) my seat-neighbour could well have been concussed by a club thrown with impressive strength but sub-standard levels of accuracy. I must confess I would have been sad to miss that.

Maybe she was just bored. Let me tell you, if anyone sitting next to me at the Actual Olympics is doing their admin instead of paying full attention, I am going to KICK OFF.

In other gymnastics news, I have worked out how to make my fortune, and that is by creating a leotard that does not immediately seek out the innermost reaches of one's backside. 

Also, I could totally do this:

I just choose not to.

Inanimate-objects-with-faces news (also contains flags)

If this post by Mr John Finnemore doesn't make you smile, you are presumably a robot. A robot whose damaged creator has quite deliberately denied it any capacity to express happiness, a fate his own father had wrought upon him by beating him repeatedly and locking him in a tiny cellar, where he was forced to eat dust and sing nursery rhymes to an audience of earwigs in a bid to remind himself what it is to be alive.

I am basically stealing paying homage to John's post by drawing attention to something that's caught my eye during the TV coverage of the World Athletics Championships. This little fella, right by the finish line (or the start line, depending on where you're starting):


I think he's a speaker of some kind, enabling the athletes to hear both starter and pistol clearly, ensuring a clean, resolutely non-controversial start to each race.

How's that working out for you, Daegu?

I also think that, in this case, the face is there quite deliberately, although I don't know if the Koreans really go in for kawaii. It does have quite the perfect expression of OMG, and in these championships, there has been a lot to OMG about.

The first attempt to take a picture of it on my telly resulted in this:


You may think it doesn't show Dai Greene in a particularly flattering pose. To that I say suck it up, Greene. You're world champion now, you need to keep your feet on the ground. Contrary to how it may appear, he was actually scratching his nose – of course he was, that's what they all say. It was done in such an apparently nonchalant fashion, totally at odds with the tension of the moment (I can quite truthfully say I felt sick with nerves all morning) that I think it was entirely put on as part of his psych-out strategy. 'Yeah, I'm just hanging out, scratching my nose a bit. What, me? Nervous? Pfffft. NO.' That is the mark of a champion. He wasn't even itchy!

If you are a Why Miss Jones early adopter, you may remember the short-lived 'Jones Of The Week' award I once bestowed on Ryan Jones, the Welsh rugby player. I almost feel moved to confer the second only JOTW title upon Greene, in an honorary capacity. This would, however, involve some kind of gross Welsh-based generalisation, so it's probably best that I'm feeling too lazy to fire up the Photoshop and draw one of history's all-time great crowns upon his head with a shaky brush tool.

Both Greene and sweet, sunshiny Hannah England (OK, Iwan Thomas, you've called her 'a lovely girl'enough now, it's getting creepy) found a British flag from the crowd and did the appropriate champion-like things with it. Do you automatically understand what to do in that respect the moment you achieve the status of medallist?

I wondered today if it ever feels a bit weird. Like, 'OK, I've got the flag. Now what? I feel a bit embarrassed. I know, I'll hold it up in the air. Oh no, it's blowing in my face. Eurgh, it tastes funny. Actually, that guy that threw it to me looked weird. Maybe he infused it with steroids so I'll fail my drug test. Maybe I'll just hold it in front of me, but not in my face. Right, I've done that. Now what? Shall I go over there and hold it a bit more? Yes. I'll do that. I'm totally doing that. OK, now I'll run over to this bit. Run over to that other bit. Oh. Actually, no one seems that interested any more. They're all watching the big screen, which is showing two pigeons fighting in the water jump. Should I ditch the flag? I'm a bit bored of holding it now. Seems rude though. Can't just toss it back into the crowd, the Daily Mail will go mental. I'll wrap it around myself like a towel. I've definitely seen people do that. Except... oh, my shoulders are all sweaty and it's sticking to them and making me feel ick.'

I've thought about this quite a lot.

I guess when you're on the kind of high that comes with achieving one of your major life ambitions – I WOULDN'T KNOW – you assume a higher state of consciousness. You've beaten the world's best. What are flags? Nothing.

Olympic update

When you are blindly, brilliantly in love, it just means that the cosmos has directed you towards your beloved solely on account of your ability to find endearing those flaws in them that others can't stand.

Take me. I thought I loved the Olympics. I learnt to love Mandeville and Wenlock, the two much-maligned mascots. I came to look fondly on their googly eyes and longed to ruffle their shiny, non-existant hair. I felt funny in my tummy every time I took a train eastwards out of London and saw that stadium-in-progress.

But, but, but... I have come to doubt my feelings because, try as I might, and lord knows I have, I just cannot learn to love this:


That logo. I just can't look it in its five eyes and pretend everything's OK with us. I wish I could.

This logo was extravagantly embossed (well, OK, just printed, if you must) on an invitation to the launch of a more-up-than-down-but-not-really-all-that-upmarket jewellery label's Olympic-themed collection, which was orginally addressed to my friend Miss W, who kindly gave it to me, as she knows I like That Kind Of Thing.

It was an upmarket invitation. Feel the thickness.

Mmmm, the thrill of luxury stationery.

I'm glad they went big-budget with the cardboard because, given the design concepts greenlit thus far, Olympics-wise, I'm not exactly holding out for the collection.

What can we possibly expect from Olympic-themed jewellery? Giant five-ringed pendants on hefty chains, reminiscent of the Beastie Boys' VW period? A big knuckle-duster of a ring that spans your whole hand, with a different coloured Olympic ring on each finger (there are too many senses of the word 'ring' going on in this paragraph for my liking). I think this was Miss W's idea. You can tell from this that she works in fashion. Another of her ideas was a tiny solid silver javelin to wear through your septum. I expect her to have her own line in Elizabeth Duke any day now.

What else? Well, if this is to be the second coming of the austerity Olympics – the sustainable Olympics, I may have heard it called – after the excesses of Beijing, then we must reuse and recycle, we must make, do and mend, we must make enthusiastic noises about natural resources and hoary craftspeople. I would like see spectacular tribal necklaces featuring feathers moulted by London's pigeons and harvested from the pavements of Trafalgar Square. I would like to see bracelets woven from the balls of dust and human hair found in the tunnels of London underground. I would like to see bangles and cuffs as red and shiny as London's iconic buses, and made from the bendy ones that are destined for the scrapheap. I would like to see chunky papier mâché beads made by primary school children throughout London's boroughs from free newspapers and magazines found discarded on various means of public transport.

Perhaps you have your own ideas. I will not be wearing any of them, obviously. Yours or mine. Or anyone else's, most likely.

In other Olympic news, despite my then-irrational infant loathing of Sebastian Coe, you can imagine that I was still thrilled to see this in my inbox.

Three hours, forty-five minutes and fourteen seconds

Maybe your brother's running his first marathon. Maybe you're terribly excited about it. Maybe some of the finest athletes in the world will be running right past the spot where you're standing. You love athletes. Maybe you and the city in which you live, whose future together is far from certain, what with your capacity for antagonism and mutual recrimination, will be having a really good day. This, then, would be the perfect time for you to leave the battery for your camera at home in the charger, where you'd remembered to put it the night before, and head out for the day with an empty, powerless camera in your bag, thus surrendering yourself to the inferior photographic skills of your mobile phone.

Excellent. Well done on that, Jones.

Young Miss Jones the Elder played the technology slightly better on Sunday, stationed in front of the computer at home like a pre-teen Uhura, carefully monitoring the digi-chat between the magic timing chip attached to her father's shoe and the internet, and reporting back to the rest of the family at their stations around the course.

Remember when I said I love athletes? I love athletes. While I was waiting to shout enthusiastic non-sequiturs at my brother at the 11-mile marker, I saw the elite men run past some time before him. At least, I think they were running. I couldn't swear to it. Pretty much what happened, I think, as it seemed to me, is that the rest of the world stopped and held its breath, and they floated past in a state of serene composure and physical perfection. It may be that I became incrementally a better person for seeing them, but I wasn't moved to buy a composter on the way home, so maybe the effect wasn't that dramatic.

This kind of thing has happened to me once before, about 12 years ago, on my only visit to Wimbledon (the tennis tournament, not the suburb – although actually, yes, both). We had seats on court number one, where Pete Sampras was playing. My friend was on Centre Court, thrilling to the lawn gymnastics of Becker (I think – it may have been Agassi), so I was sweating pure resentment when 'Pistol' Pete and his fuss-free competence walked on to the court. And then he started playing. That shut me up. 'You know that thing your soul rattles around in all day, the thing with the arms and the legs and the all-over skin?' Pete Sampras imaginarily said to me, in my seat far back in the stands. (Imaginarily, Pete Sampras has a really loud voice. Also, imaginarily, 'imaginarily' is an OK word to use.) 'Well, this is how it really works.'

In two years, London will be full of incredible people like this, and if you don't think this is very exciting you either a) don't live in London or b) would not endear yourself to me at a dinner party if this subject came up in conversation, causing me to sulk through dessert, snapping at accusations I was 'quiet this evening', and lie my way out of attending subsequent dinner parties I knew you would also be attending.

Anyway, at some point between the elite athletes and my brother (which is not such a big distance as you might think, not at 11 miles in any case) were the brilliant but mortal. One of them fell right in front of me, slipping over in the wet, his skin rasping across the tarmac. It was awful. No one knew what to do as he hauled himself up, furious and sore. The terror of saying something idiotic, so insultingly inane and unhelpful was paralysing. The very people who you'd think might have been up to the job, four St John Ambulance persons, remained rooted to the spot, dumbly brandishing a giant tub of Vaseline. Perhaps they are schooled not to approach an elite athlete in peril, in case they set about their finely-tuned muscles with excess enthusiasm and too-heavy hands. I hope that's the reason. I don't know what to say about them if it's not.

It feels hollow and all sorts of wrong to shout 'You can do it!' to someone who probably can, but not the way they want to, when you know that that difference means everything. I felt a bit like this afterwards with my brother, who did brilliantly but not brilliantly enough for him. I am counting on the attrition of congratulations and impressed faces he encounters over the next few weeks to convince him otherwise.

'Gym? Your name is gym?'*

It's true that I don't much like gyms at the best of times – they smell funny and they play terrible music – but you can't tell me this isn't a little bit sinister:


I'm not sure if it's the steps descending into tomb-like oblivion, or how gothic the logo's typographical flourishes seem when rendered in white on black. Whichever, it smacks of infernal nightmares.

What happens inside? Are people being sacrificed on toning tables? (My use of the expression 'toning tables' is indicative of the last time I was in a gym.) Are people doing their combat training bare knuckle? Against snarling yellowed-eyed hounds? Are lost souls wailing and crying and tearing at their own skin because there's no fluffy towels left and they're having to use their own scratchy ones from home?

The sun was shining, but my blood was chilled as I went on my way.

* You win a prize† if you can identify this film quotation. It utilises a pun on gym/Jim**.
† You do not win a prize.
** I may not be quoting it entirely accurately.
Good luck!

My Olympic bid

If you are a long-term reader of this blog – and there actually are some, actually – you will know that I have feelings for the 2012 Olympics in the same way that Peggy Ollerenshaw on Hi-de-Hi has feelings for her yellow coat*. I ache for them. (Strictly speaking - not Strictly speaking – it's any Olympics. I'm an Olympics slut. When it comes to me and the Olympics, I'm a sure thing.)

Bearing this in mind - and I bear it in mind ALL THE TIME - you will not be surprised to learn that I long ago registered to work as a volunteer at the Games. My mind is not that of a brilliant strategist. My plan is basically this. a) I volunteer at the Olympics. b) That means I will surely be entitled to better tickets to watch stuff. c) I will be Part Of Things and it will be Great. Deluded as I am, even I can tell that I am placing a morbidly obese sense of expectation on the rickety bridge that links (a) and (b). But I'm pretty sure that the bridge between a) and c) is strong enough to support the weight of the whole Olympics. And some of those weightlifters are really big guys.

Things I would like to do as a volunteer: have a cool costume; ring a bell at the end of one of the swimming lanes; write things down on a clipboard; look after Kenenisa Bekele's tracksuit.

Things I would not like to do as a volunteer: wear a matronly, below-the-knee white pleated skirt, unflattering blazer and panama-style hat; lie outstretched on a jetty holding on to the end of a boat before the start of a rowing event; stand around at a tube station all day explaining the benefits of buying an Oyster card in GCSE-level German to people who are Portuguese and NOT SEE ANYTHING.

Since I first feverishly signed up last year to volunteer, I've had occasional emails from 'London 2012' (that's the name that appears in the 'From' field in your inbox. First name: London. Surname: 2012. Like, wow, the Olympics are personally emailing me?). These emails have two objectives. Firstly, to say don't worry, you big Olympics-obsessed freak, we haven't forgotten about you, we just don't start the proper volunteer job process until next year. Secondly, to say read on because we are about to passively-aggressively make you feel bad about not volunteering in your community on a regular basis.

There is an initial bit of chit-chat about how worthwhile volunteering can be; volunteering is for life not just to get seats at the 2012 Olympics, etc etc. Then they lay down their trump card. It reads thus:

Although such experience will not be a prerequisite should you choose to apply to be a volunteer at the Games, it may be of use in the decision you will need to make next year.

I think we all know what this means. It means, 'If you don't do this, obviously it's absolutely fine, it's no problem at all. Only… it's just that everyone who's in the Olympics, including Usain Bolt who basically likes everyone, will think you are a MASSIVE BITCH. Also, you will get given a SHIT JOB.'

So when Jones Major asked me to help him officiate at the end-of-season meeting of his local athletics club, deep in the wilds of Bedfordshire, for love not money, I whooped and shook my clenched fists at the sky and shouted, 'Are you watching, Olympic Volunteering Overlords? This is how much I CARE!'

I didn't do this. I was at work. But I did it a bit inside.

So that is what I did last weekend. I helped with the long jump and triple jump.

Here is the Jones empire:

My incredibly important and 100 per cent VOLUNTARY job was to stick the marker that is attached to one end of the tape measure into the pit at the earliest point of contact between jumper and sand.

It taught me some very valuable lessons. Among them:

1. Pushy parents are sometimes out-pushied by their offspring.

Jacob, an extremely excited junior athlete: [To the Joneses] Are we starting now? Are we starting now? Are we starting now?

Joneses: Yes, in a minute.

Jacob's dad: [Weary] Just wait until they call you, Jacob.

Pushy parents are, however, far from extinct: 'Well done, Kate. Not good enough, but well done.'

2. If you are tasked with a job where you are constantly stepping forward on one leg and bending forward, into a sandpit, over and over again, for many athletes, each taking multiple jumps, this is the equivalent of doing about 100 lunges. If you are a person who, in going about their daily routine, does 0 (zero) lunges, the result of this over-exertion is that you can't walk downstairs properly for the following four days.

3. If, on the occasion of repeatedly bending forwards, you have chosen to wear hipster jeans, you may find yourself repeatedly mooning the car park/grandstand/men's hockey pitch [delete according to the circumstances of your sportsground].

This is the kind of sagacity that will leave the 2012 volunteering chiefs reeling. At this rate, I will probably be firing the starting pistol in the 100m final.

*Tessa Jowell is my Miss Cathcart. Or is it Lord Coe?

How do I love the World Athletics Championships?

Let me count the ways.

I love a quiet weekend with nothing to do except colonise the sofa and regress to school summer holidays where I lived for each round of every event, the tiny victories of beaten British athletes scoring season's bests. And then sometimes, like today, a proper reason to edge forward on the seat and scrunch up the loose material of the cushions in my fists, and get Really Properly Excited.

I love how the male 100m athletes – who used to stand silent and immobile before the race, staring down the straight like lizards on a rock, eyes dead with concentration – now babble incessantly to themselves in self-motivational tongues, like bus passengers you would always try to avoid, or flirt with the panning camera, trying to be a little bit more like Usain Bolt, the coolest kid in 100m school – charming, insouciant, maddeningly gifted.

I love Hazel Irvine wittering misguidedly on about Jessica Ennis and Denise Lewis's six-packs, and then trying to make it OK by wittering on about Colin Jackson's too.

I love the blindly optimistic way the commentary team anticipate Jessica Ennis being on the newspaper front pages tomorrow, and spearheading the Sports Personality Of The Year shortlist come December, neatly forgetting about the speed and heat of Formula 1, and the cinematic potential of the Flintoff Finale, and how little people care about athletics any more. When I was young, summer television was studded with weekly primetime meetings, grand prix from glamorous European cities, fantasies under floodlights. Now, anything that's not a major championships is scheduled like an obscure Open University broadcast.

I love Louise Hazel boasting that she'd predicted the Great British Heptathlon Success via social networking. "I said on Facebook we'd come back stronger." I like to imagine Daley Thompson and Jurgen Hingsen psyching each other out with how many Twitter followers they had.

I love the rounded, balding paps sprinting red-faced, flat-out, just to catch up with Usain Bolt easing down to a jog.

I love the snowy-haired, agitated track official ineffectually attempting to martial the victorious Bolt and the group of photographers swarming around him, flapping his arms like he's shooing a stubborn gang of geese off his front lawn.

I love the BBC playing back the studio's reactions to the 100m as it happened. I'm an idiot for this kind of thing and always have been. I have loved seeing Ian Wright and John Barnes jumping up and down on their studio chairs like over-excited children on the last day of school, just because England made football things happen; I loved Michael Johnson's face today, the perfect expression of Man Witnessing A Miracle.

Advertising review

I seem to have gone on a lot about magazines recently, and I'm entirely a creature of habit, so this is an extract from the advertisements at the back of Saturday's Guardian magazine.

Let's temporarily bypass Steve Davis and his jauntily hoisted thumb, and consider the advertiser called 'Ever So Sexy'. Ever So Sexy make underwear and there is a woman in their advert wearing it. She looks Ever So Sexy. 'Ever So Sexy' must be one of the most unsexy ways to modify the adjective sexy in the history of sexy. Still, with their extravagant national advertising campaign, they must be raking it in over their passion-halting rivals Jolly Sexy, Sexy Young Filly and I Am Calling You Sexy But I Am Doing So In A Baby Voice.

Anyway, what of Steve and his 'approval' of the Network Veka windows and conservatories? I will confess to being surprised at the site of his palid yet chipper countenance. When Steve Davis was at his professional zenith in the 80s, he was mocked for his consistency and aura of calm. Boring old Steve 'Interesting' Davis. I always found him very droll, and not at all dull. And here he is, thrillingly outside the repertoire of goods I would expect to find him endorsing, which include snooker tables, snooker balls, snooker cues, waistcoats, perhaps insurance.

Why, then, is Steve Davis so very passionate about windows and conservatories? Well, if one is considering becoming a snooker superpower, one needs a practice room. The average household simply cannot accommodate a full-size table. Most barely have a dining room. It's a little-known fact that the No 1 reason people buy conservatories is so they can recreate the conditions of the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield – perfecting their potting, naturally; training their eyes to withstand the glare of the lights by facing off against some fierce, low afternoon sun through the windows; persuading an elderly relative to cough bronchially at crucial moments of concentration or unwrap a Murray Mint at a freakish pitch, until one's nerves become hardened to an iron shield.

As for the windows, well, one of the random facts I have assimilated though a childhood of watching A Question Of Sport and the inferior Sporting Triangles with my dad, is that Steve Davis is fanatical about a certain strand of weird French music. On the cul-de-sac where all retired sportsmen live, Stuart Pearce could barely hear his punk anthems over the Gallic racket emanating from no 6, Casa Davis or, more informally, Steve's. Until, that is, he discovered the joy of double glazing, and everyone could live together in harmony - Roger Black with his James Taylor CDs, Pat Nevin with his mint-condition Joy Division seven-inches.

Soldier in a silver blanket

It is a source of shame to me that I have lived in London for 13 years and never in person watched any part of the London Marathon – even though I cry at the highlights programme every year without fail (the limping heroes! the ludicrously rousing music!). This year I managed to be in the middle of town on the day, which represents real progress, and even caught a fleeting glimpse of a straggler in the wheelchair race on the Embankment as I crossed Waterloo Bridge above him on the 176 bus. However, my business in town was to see Tony Beak and Erin Boag in Cheek To Cheek at the Coliseum, a birthday present from Lady C (so maybe it's OK if your birthday cards are still up three months on, as long as you are still harvesting your presents), rather than to weep at athletes.

Running a marathon is pretty much an everyday miracle but still, a miracle is a miracle. Right, Jesus? Because of this, I can never quite believe my eyes when I see the marathon runners suffering the trials of public transport on their way home. I don't know what I'm expecting. I'm sure there's little enough in the hospitality budget for the elite athletes. There's no way it can run to a chauffeur-driven car for each plucky club runner or foolhardy fundraiser.

Still I always feel it's fundamentally unfair when, as this afternoon, I see someone in a batman costume waiting for the bus in the resolutely inglorious environs of the Elephant & Castle, or watch a woman dissuade the bus driver from whipping the doors shut for minute on agonising minute on Denmark Hill while her race-weary companion winces his way down from the top deck, as though there were upturned razor blades on every step.

If you have a medal around your neck, even if it is materially worthless, forged from melted down fragments of an unloved Esso Coin Collection, surely you should not have to dirty your hands with Oyster cards, or your aching legs on a matted tube seat studded with chewing gum and fried chicken bones. It somehow shatters the illusion of heroism. It's like going to visit the Wizard of Oz and discovering the little old man behind the curtain, or seeing the rods furiously working the limbs of the Muppets. And I don't want to witness Clark Kent going about his everyday business, even though I usually fancy him far more than I do Superman. 

I don't understand it. But from being in town this afternoon, I understand this most clearly. If my husband or partner had just run 26 miles, probably painfully and for charity, I wouldn't then make him follow me around the Charing Cross branch of Jigsaw, sitting red-faced and weary outside the changing rooms while I tried a load of new clothes on. Even if there is a sale on.

'You are the latest contender'

I've invented another new job for myself.

It doesn't have a name yet, but it might be 'Performance Environment Technician'. It might not. I might replace 'Technician' with 'Creative'. Anyway, it would basically involve matching darts players with the music they walk on to.

The most unlikely people seem to develop an all-consuming obsession with darts for the duration of any televised tournament. This also happens with snooker (and to those fans I say RIP David Vine), except that the all-consumed seem to become even more consumed, which probably means they're existing in some kind of negative reality. ANYWAY. I am not one of those people, but I did happen to see the start of one of the darts semi-finals at the weekend. As each player enters the darting arena - I know I am getting the lexicon of darts so, so wrong – a kind of signature song is played. It seems like boxing in this respect, but without the satin dressing gowns. 

Some examples: On Saturday, the victorious Tony O'Shea came on to Hey Baby by DJ Otzi. This, if you ask me, is kind of lame. Any walk-on is, I feel, cheapened by a background of Europop. You're not a tiger, you're some kind of repetitively squawking parakeet. And they can't play darts. Darryl Fitton may have lost the match/game/bout but he won the battle of the walk-on music by choosing One Step Beyond by Madness. With the minimum of research, I have discovered that Martin Adams, who lost the other semi-final, enters to Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran, which seems a brilliantly flamboyant choice for such a traditionally working class sport.

And I can't believe that no one would have bagged Darts Of Pleasure by Franz Ferdinand yet. If not, I'm reserving that for myself just in case I ever decide to give the arrows a go, competition-wise.

Even in its remotest pastures – which is to say darts – sport seems to be less and less about pure physical endeavour, and more about the application of science (psychology in particular), sponsorship and celebrity. The choice of walk-on music, then, is absolutely critical, to focus and stimulate the senses (I want to say 'pump you up', but that sounds common), raise the profile and deliver a player to the oche like a jungle cat ready to pounce.

So I'm imagining my own consultancy (I'm struggling with the name – Let's Face The Music And Darts?) where rookie darts players, new to the circuit, come to my office, are offered a choice of herbal teas and mineral waters, talk to me about their dreams and fears for their career, and perhaps their star sign. I might ask them to walk up and down to assess the rhythm of their gait. You couldn't, for example, have someone with an urgent, nimble, pitter-pattering tread walking on to Barry White or some loose-limbed reggae. I don't imagine there are many darts players who walk like this, but every player is an individual (that's part of my mission statement).

I might then hold up some colour swatches to their face in front of a mirror, to find out what 'season' they are. And then I would subject them to a rigorous round of psychometric testing [1. Imagine you are throwing darts at a photograph pinned to a wall. Is it a photo of a) your mother, b) your father, c) Eric Bristow, the Crafty Cockney, d) yourself? etc etc].

At the end of all this, I present them with a small selection of anthems perfectly matched to their darts persona. They come burned on to a CD in a presentation case, with a cover I have designed specially on my computer, printed out, maybe found was slightly too big, then had to cut round the edges to make it fit in.

That will be £3,500 please. 

In which I learn a valuable lesson from Neville Southall

Here is a job I would like on a permanent basis: professional fete stallholder.

This is not the kind of full-time job to fund a wardrobe of couture clothes or serious gambling habit or growing collection of fabergé eggs. It is a job to have as a kind of absorbing hobby, while your investment banker husband works every hour and never sees his children awake, and your au pair makes the organic packed lunches. 

At the moment, what with having to pay my own mortgage, I am only on occasional work experience in the feting profession. After flirting with car-booting, I fell in love with the world of the stallholder in the summertime, helping out my godmother at a community fete in central London, close to several hospitals. Almost all the classic elements were there – ballet display by local youth group, adult-education belly-dancers, stalls selling Reader's Digest Cookery Books and unloved ornaments, and an ageing rock band called Bloodless Coup. All that was missing was a member of the clergy and a guess the weight of the cake competition. To quote Craig Revel-Horwood, I LOVED it.

I am lucky, in many respects, that I work with people who are mostly my own age. In any office situation I go into, it is very unlikely there will be anyone there more than 8 years younger or older than me. By laws of proportion which I have just made up, but which I believe to be basically sound, I will get on with 80% of them, have plenty in common with 60% and could conceivably become properly great, lasting friends with 40%. 

It's an absolute boon for one's social life, of course, but you do forget what it's like to talk to people who are not wearing patent shoe-boots or Converse. But throw yourself into the fete milieu and there you are behind the ramparts of your trestle, one hand on your float, the other gripping a polystyrene cup of grey tea, with the world growing bigger and wider before your very eyes. You're selling jam to chalky-faced old ladies in too-bright lipstick, and discussing cake with father-and-son duos, any one of whom is pushing the other in a wheelchair. It is highly unlikely that any of these people have heard of Agyness Deyn, and you love them all the more for it. Their mere proximity is surprisingly exciting and you find yourself thrilling! to a hitherto unknown sense of community and embracing! the rich diversity of the human race.

Anyway, yesterday I was mostly embracing the rich diversity of middle-class three-wheeled-buggy-pushers in East Dulwich, helping my friend Miss L sell her excellent cards and Christmas decorations from a stall on the main street on the coldest day of the year, for six hours. I spent more consecutive minutes wearing a woolly hat than I ever have in my life before, I believe. And the cruel machinations of time taught me a lesson, which is that my hat is really, really itchy. At frequent intervals, I found myself rubbing it violently across my forehead and down my  cheeks in a manic attempt to relieve the irritation, like a dog gradually rubbing away its own fur. As a result, by about 10 o'clock last night, I had an angry red rash right across the top half of my face, thrown into even more dramatic relief by the regular pallor of the bottom half of my face. In a desperate attempt at remedial action, I went to bed last night with my face covered in a thick white layer of E45 cream, like someone answering the door unexpectedly to their love interest in a romantic comedy. Incredibly, no love interest at all rang my doorbell last night. I'm not sure what this means. Probably it means my doorbell is broken.

What does this mean for my future in feting? It means that I will apply a thick layer of Vaseline all over my face before putting on my hat, like Neville Southall slathering his eyebrows with it before taking to his goal. You never saw his forehead smarting scarletly.

Luckily, things had calmed down immeasurably redface-wise by the time I got the bus to Crystal Palace for lunch with my friend, Nurse W, today. On the way, the bus drove past a grass verge where I saw a grey squirrel in curiously close proximity to a magpie. Ten metres further on, I saw exactly the same scenario once again – squirrel, magpie, proximity. It was like I had stumbled across some kind of animal-kingdom partner-swapping party. It made me feel a bit weird.

 

The two Ronnies

What is the word for people who have the same name but are totally different beings, preferably with as diverse jobs as possible? There must be one, lurking within the etymological family that gives us synonym and its siblings. 

I have reflected before on the many skills of the David Battys – one a midfield terrier and the other a BBC antiques expert. And this weekend I was skim-reading some broadsheet earnestness about the film Steve McQueen has just made. The Turner Prize-winning one, not the dead one.

But a few days ago, as I was reading some round-up of moving and shaking in the magazine industry, I was reminded of my favourite matching pair.

Ronnie Whelan, ex-editor of Hello magazine and…

Ronnie Whelan, mainstay of Liverpool and the Republic of Ireland's midfield during the 80s. Perhaps this goes some way to explain the particular fondness shown to WAGs by celebrity magazines. Anything for the missus, like.

And another thing

Sometime soon I may stop banging on about the Olympics. But till then...

If you are a Games savant, as I am, it will no longer be a surprise to find yourself becoming emotionally involved with all manner of sports you may normally turn your nose up. Boxing, for me, is one of the more unlikely.

The BBC have tried to colour up the GB boxing team by casting them as some kind of Lock, Stock…-style band of lovable scrappers, with special graphics showing mugshots of 'The Beijing Seven' and profiles of each competitor, complete with fascinating trivia and occasional nicknames which may well have been invented by Guy Richie.

Their profile of super-heavyweight David Price reads: 'Nicknamed "Dynamite", he is a qualified central heating engineer.'

Now, while I am admittedly over-enthusiastic about punctuation, there is something strange and unfortunate about the way these clauses seem to be related. If I was to hire a central heating engineer to come round to my house and meddle around with things like, oh, highly flammable gas and the like, I wouldn't enjoy the thought that the nickname 'Dynamite' might somehow prove pertinent.

It was encouraging to see David Price doing his best to inhabit his LockStock-alike alter ego after he knocked out an opponent in an early round. Price ran over to the ropes and bellowed into the crowd 'YER BASSTARD!' entirely audibly, thanks to some manner of ringside microphone. The BBC chose to silence this outburst for the U-certificate early-evening highlights show, but I would have enjoyed it more if they'd overdubbed his profanity with the words 'YOU'RE BUSTED' using the too-plummy voice of a jobbing actor. Budget cuts are, I assume, responsible.

With apologies to the sisterhood

I'm not at all proud of what I'm about to write. I've been sitting on my hands for the last few days, trying to keep the shallow sentiments that will follow from wreaking their wrongness on my keyboard. But it is no good. They must out. 

I simply cannot bear the on-screen wardrobes of Hazel Irvine and Sue Barker.

I know this statement is a hateful affront to womenkind. I know it. After all, how marvellous it is that women are presenting more hours of Olympic coverage than men. How refreshing not to see the same old salt-and-pepper-haired boys' club, legs splayed across the sofas, making tiresome jokes about the women's volleyball competition.

And I can understand that Sue and Hazel may not be keen on any kind of coquettish get-up that would undermine their position as serious broadcasters of integrity, women who've been doggedly ploughing their furrow for years in a historically male field, and are finally reaping some primetime benefits. But would it be beyond the capabilities of any of the parties involved to find them some non-fripperous, properly grown-up presenters' attire that's, like, smart and nice?

Who unleashed this procession of boxy, unflattering, three-quarter-sleeved shirts that is taking place on my screen? It's as though someone doing work experience at the BBC put a load of Adrian Chiles' washing on at the wrong temperature and everything shrunk. And then some parsimonious member of the wardrobe department said, 'Well, there's still plenty of wear left in these. I suppose they'd do for Sue and Hazel.' I turned on the TV one morning last week, and I swear Hazel and The Chiles were wearing the same outfit – preppy pale blue shirts with beige chino-style chinos. And on Saturday, two female friends and I were watching the afternoon coverage when they cut back to Sue In The Studio. The three of us, in perfect unison, recoiled in horror at her candy-striped top with criss-cross, pirate-style lace-up feature around the neck, not unlike the reviled Manchester United shirts of the early 90s. On other days it's not unusual to see a saggy, baggy polo shirt on show that makes our host look like she's off to volunteer at a kennels. Oh for a chic trouser suit for La Barker.

So there you are. I am a wretched person. As I type this, I can hear the marching footsteps of an army of angry lady sports presenters heading for my house. Look, there's the glow of their burning torches through my flimsy curtains. They should be careful. Some of those tops don't half look flammable. 

Dictionary corner – US special

1) Yesterday, on their early-evening Beijing highlights programme, the BBC showed how US television was choosing to cover the continuing success of swimfreak Michael Phelps. I think it may have been NBC who described him as 'the winningest athlete in history'. Apparently, 'winningest' is a perfectly legitimate adjective in the US – but not over here, of course, because it sounds COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS.

2) Meanwhile, Miss L and I are in a pre-holiday hotel-booking frenzy. Just today, Miss L received an automated reply to one email enquiry which read: 'I will be away from the office on a personal renewal returning Monday 18th August.' I do not know what a personal renewal is. Discounting baptism or gender reassignment, I'm assuming it's some kind of grandiloquising of the mythological 'duvet day', where the jaded office worker emerges from the chrysalis of their bedclothes to live again a butterfly. 

Next time in Dictionary Corner, I attempt to ascertain if grandiloquising is a proper word.

The weight of the world

With a contented sigh, I can confirm that the Olympics really have properly arrived now that the Great Britain team has had its first episode of hapless calamity.

Boxer Frankie Gavin – a Genuine Gold Medal Contender. No, He Is. We Really Mean It This Time - has failed to make the correct weight for his boxing classification. He couldn't lose the cursed extra pounds in time for the weigh-in and tipped the scales 3lb too far. If you're already thinking, why can't he just fight in a heavier division, you are astute, and perhaps enjoying Sport Mastermind as much as I am. But this is a no-go for 'Fun Time' Frankie (I'm not even making that up) because another British boxer has already qualified at that weight, and that is the Olympic Law. So now, Frankie Gavin – so special, he has a first name for a surname, like George Michael and, er, Barry George – is on his way home again with barely a scuff to his Team GB trainers.

One of the very few things I hate about saturated TV coverage of a major sporting event - and this is most true of football tournaments – is the way that the media assumes a perfect, unbroken divide between the sexes, in an 'Uh-oh, ladies. Say goodbye to 'im indoors for two weeks' kind of fashion. Men country-wide are assumed to be commencing an unbroken sofa sit-in in front of the television, building a stockade of empty beer cans around them in attempt to buffer the Endless Nagging. Every member of the female population, meanwhile, is somehow imagined to be frantically organising ladies' nights out to beige wine bars and writing impassioned letters to ITV2 begging them to repeat Cold Feet.

To this, I can only say urgh. But still, some people believe it, and those of them who work in sports marketing must be wondering how to get more women through the turnstiles or onto the sofa, and cerebrally ingesting the commercial breaks or advertising hoardings. And they're really missing a trick in failing to exploit the weight loss issue inherent in competitive boxing. Why aren't they fighting stereotype with stereotype? After all, women everywhere, all of them, are constantly dieting, all the time, and never more so than right now, in preparation for that once-yearly beach holiday that every single one of us has, without fail, every summer. The Olympic boxing contenders may be striving to fit into the top end of an official weight bracket, rather than, say, a tiger-print two-piece with halterneck, but the principle is the same.

The readers of Closer would, I am sure, embrace a cover star like Frankie Gavin. Imagine him pictured with a championship belt cinched around his waist, customised with the markings of a tape measure, and the neon type claiming 'I lost 5lb in 24 hours and now I'm the lightweight champion of the world!' Think of the Fun Times Frankie and his boxing friends could have testing seaweed wraps for the readers of Cosmopolitan. The female sex would be cheering on the lads in no time, becoming afficionados of the sport only a short time later. And with the accusatory gaze of women's weekly magazines trained upon him, maybe Frankie would have felt sufficient pressure to shed the weight. What harsher spotlight is there, after all?

Eight more days

There is a millipede of excitement crawling around inside me. Sometimes it sleeps, and then sometimes, when I've forgotten about it, I feel it wriggling around my stomach, or its many legs scuttling up and down my spine. And then I remember what it is, and why it's there.

IT IS NEARLY TIME FOR THE OLYMPICS.

It is 8 days to the Opening Ceremony, to be precise. More than cream-coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels, the Olympics are a few of my favourite things. Since the first games I can remember – Los Angeles in 1984 – I've waited impatiently for them to come around again every four years, and light up the Jones world like a comet. I might no longer meticulously fill in the wallcharts and Olympic-themed scrapbooks I used to when I was 10, but metaphorically, I'm not so far away at all.

We were talking about the Games at work today, and the lovely Sophie who I was sitting next to asked if anyone remembered Animalympics, a feature-length animated film from 1980 about – wait, yes – animals competing in their own Olympics. Of course I did. I loved it. It was shown on TV at intervals throughout our youth, whenever a Games was on the horizon,or at the occasional Easter or Christmas. It had slapstick. It had brilliant satire on TV sports coverage. It had awesome sequences set to music, which I now know was composed by the bass player from 10CC. The rights to Animalympics seem to be in the clutches of Disney and, while a DVD release is promised for 2010, it seems unlikely that it will be shown on non-premium-rate TV any time soon. But luckily, there are people in this world who care enough about Animalympics and YouTube to be able to bring the two together and make the world a better place – for you and for me and the entire human race.

Rejoice. Our children will be able to watch Animalympics. We will almost certainly win something in Beijing. And here is a taste of turn-of-the-80s animation in all its beautiful, bonkers glory. These can of course contribute towards your three-a-day happiness count. I'm here to help.

Cry freedom

I have been rhapsodising at great length to anyone I meet about Last Choir Standing, the BBC's new Saturday night programme with real people in it that is not a quiz or the news. If you are the sort of person who has better things to do on a Saturday night than watch Last Choir Standing then a) who are you, b) do we have anything at all in common, and, where b) is 'no', then c) what on earth are you doing reading this [although you're welcome and lord knows I could use the stats].

Anyway. What I have been saying to my friends is that LCS is like crying Viagra. Perhaps, on account of many and varying trials in your life, you are feeling slightly emotional, a little bit sangry*, but are having trouble letting go of your pride/sense of self-possession/meticulously applied eye make-up and drenching your upper body in the bittersweet balm of fresh tears. Whoever you are, whatever your inhibition, Last Choir Standing is your release. Unless you are a lump of coal, after no more than seven minutes, I guarantee your eyes will be slightly to very moist. After 14 minutes, tears will be flowing like Niagara Falls. And after explaining this to several friends, I thought to myself 'Hmm, what else is crying Viagra?' And furthermore, 'This is exactly the kind of whimsical self-indulgence that makes for a blog post.' (The self-indulgence of blogging is another thing I have been talking a lot about recently.)

However, then I read this in The Guardian. Apparently, it's more over than Oasis to say that anything is 'something Viagra'. Damn The Guardian, with their compulsive, smug and frequently tenuous trend-spotting (no offence, Miss W). I am quite over many aspects of their paper, in particular their many factual errors, one of which, brilliantly, occurs at the end of their vitriolic blast on the subject of the Viagra metaphor. But I am nothing if not weak-willed and easily led, and also loathe to contribute to The Guardian's ascendant sense of self-satisfaction. So:

Miss Jones' Most Efficacious Cry Porn (a work in progress)

1) Last Choir Standing – see above. In particular the Choir Of Elderly Fisherman ('Well, we didn't get through this time but maybe this will attract some young members who aren't likely to die within 5 years') and the Policemen's Choir ('The Choir really helped me through after the premature death of my wife').

2) The watery eyes of Bernard Cribbins.

3) Watching YouTube clips of Derek Redmond in the 1992 Olympic 400m semi-final.

4) The London Marathon. Not just the dogged charity fundraisers collapsing yards from the finish and the rousing Chariots Of Fire-pastiche music but, in recent years, the messages scrolling along the bottom of the screen saying 'Go on Dad, we're so proud of you, from your loving family' etc etc. Jones Major is keen to run in 2009. Heaven help Jones Minor's tear ducts should his application prove successful. Jones Minor is me, if you were unsure.

5) The end of The Railway Children. This is for advanced recreational cryers only and should not be attempted by amateurs needing to accomplish anything during the rest of the day.

*Sad and angry (copyright Randy Hickey)

Being David Batty

Among many other sporting icons we celebrated, my dad and I used to bond over David Batty, the ex-Leeds United player. In the early 90s, I was a fresher at Leeds University during the local team's briefest-possible tenure of the league championship. When funds permitted, which was rarely – I was a girl from the barren Norfolk flatlands dropped into a city with an awful lot of shops – I would go to Elland Road and watch Leeds make heavy weather of drawing with lesser teams. I came home for the holidays to find my dad had fixed a penant saying 'Wilko's Champs: Pride Of Yorkshire' – rapidly becoming an ironic slogan – in my bedroom window. David Batty was a particularly fond kind of talisman for us. Who knows why, but we felt limitless affection for the dour, spade-a-spade midfield scrapper.

He was a stick of footballing rock with Yorkshire written right through him. Until he moved to Blackburn Rovers, as it turned out. He was tough. He was bloody-minded. He did not score many goals.

After his retirement, David Batty slipped off my radar, although I caught him a couple of times on Sky One's pro-celebrity The Match. But I never saw him donning his slacks and pale blue shirt (evidently the strictly enforced dress code for the BBC's Euro 2008 panel) as  a pundit-for-hire, and he never seemed the type for a career in motivational speaking. Perhaps, I pondered, he had opened an ironmongers in Guiseley with Mel Sterland, or taken over a bar on the Costa del Sol with John Lukic.

So yesterday, imagine my delight when I was reading The Guardian's report on the Rooney/McLoughlin nuptials, in an attempt to receive a dispassionate, purely factual report on this most sociologically important of  festivals, to see that one of the co-authors was none other than David Batty. Well, who else better qualified to reflect on the extra-curricular pressures of a young footballer at the epicentre of the modern game? When I clicked on the link to his Guardian profile, I was impressed to see that my David Batty had adopted a disguise, albeit of the primitive moustache-and-false-nose-attached-to-glasses model, in a bid to reinvent himself and shake off any stigma associated with the intelligence of footballers, thus ensuring his work is judged fairly when the Pulitzer Prize committee come a-knocking.

In addition, it has now come to my attention that David Batty regularly 'ages up', and glues on a moustache and eyebrows  – or maybe it is actually three moustaches, I'm no expert – from his disguise kit in order to disseminate to the general public his considerable expertise in the field of possibly valuable old stuff on the BBC's popular Antiques Roadshow programme.

That is not all.

He is also a TV director, producer (you will, no doubt, remember his work on Hitler In Colour), lawyer, freelance IT professional and part-time accordionist. I could go on.

He is, I am telling you, a modern day Leonardo. How long will it be before his image and accomplishments adorn the animated credits of The South Bank Show? Melvyn – and I know you're reading this – you surely know what you must do.

Paying the penalty

The fact that this no!-my-eyes, small-bit-of-sick-in-your-mouth image exists is, I am afraid, my fault.

I was out last night, and only got back for the very end of extra time in the Champions League Final. As I twisted and twitched my way through my usual routine of not quite bearing to be in the same room as a penalty shootout, but not wanting to totally miss it either, I managed to see Ronaldo not-scoring. 'Ha!' I thought. 'I don't even care if Manchester United win now, because that punchable little stoat has missed.' This was obviously an enormous untruth, because in the end I cared very much, in a deeply negative way, that Manchester United won, being a big non-fan. And I was punished by karma slapping me hard across the face, both for my falsehood and my utter lack of charity. Not to mention my prodigious ability to bear a grudge.

I have learnt an extremely sobering lesson about not taking joy in another person's misfortunes, even if they are Cristiano Ronaldo's, and also being careful what you wish for. I am today a chastened correspondant.